Recommend method to embed Activiti

[ms1]

Hello All,

We want to embed Activiti in our own application so that it is seamlessly integrated(think Activiti Explorer in our application). We would also like to take advantage of the Activity Form rendering if at all possible. We use Spring MVC + Thymeleaf for the UI.

I have seen some suggestions, but thought I would ask the community what would you do to integrate Activiti?

TIA

[jbarrez]

Activiti is very easy to integrate with. Regarding forms, there is nothing out of the box with Thymeleaf our something reusable. Hence, you should use the very simple 'formKey' approach. We're doing the same on our cloud environment https://activiti.alfresco.com/

[ms1]

Hello Joram,

Thanks for your reply. Another requirement we have is that we don't want to require development (e.g. a form page) for every workflow we create. The custom form rendering looks like an attractive option because it will generate the forms for each workflow. Are there any resources explaining how to do this?

[jbarrez]

This is pretty much up to how you like it. I'm not 100% following by what you mean that 'it will generate the forms'. Typically, you want to model forms together with your processes.

Activiti is very liberal here. You put whatever you want in the formKey (jsp, html, Jsf page, whatever). And Activiti exposes that in the API and gives you access to the variables to store and retrieve data for your form. That's pretty much it.

[jbarrez]

Unless you ment the form properties approach (which is currently the way it's implemented in Activiti Explorer). That one has a form renderer in the UI that understands all kinds of basic widgets (textfield, number picker, etc). However, that is currently quite limited, but can be extended with custom coding of course.

[ms1]

Thank you for the advice. We are moving forward with external form rendering and already have many user functions (claim, start, view available, etc.) plus form data interaction integrated. We are making good progress.